


Because He's Gone

by noifsandsorbees



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 08:04:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5326748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noifsandsorbees/pseuds/noifsandsorbees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His life is a series of broken promises, so he instantly knew he’d break the only one she’d made him swear to, sobbing in the middle of the night somewhere in Oklahoma. <i>Never try to find him, Mulder. I can’t do this twice.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Because He's Gone

He hates her a little, and if it wasn’t just them against the world, he’d hate her almost as much as he hates himself.

He felt it first one night during the second month of sleeping in a motel by her side, as he blinked his way out of a nightmare of five little fingers curling around his thumb, of tiny breath on his cheek and drool on his nose, and looked over at the brown hair draped over her face.

She’s easier to hate, this stranger, with eyes clouded in darkness and three days of dirt and dust knotting her strange locks, with her sad mouth on his and her stomach still mapped with the scars of their misery.

This isn’t the woman he’d relied on every day at work to tear him down, who he spent seven years trying to kiss, the one who peered up at him from champagne-soaked eyes as he’d held her on the beach. This woman knows how to train a gun on invisible enemies almost in her sleep, only knows a baseball bat for the protection it could bring in a dark room.

This woman is instinct and passion, anger and fear, love and complete loss.

He loves her more than he could ever hate her, each cell in his body having written her into his DNA. He holds her close each night, kisses her like they’re still a family, makes her know that he is nothing without her, except for those few times that he thinks he has nothing because of her.

He had thought being on the run with her would be almost a welcomed vacation, night after night and day after day of just them. The two of them drinking bad coffee and fighting over the radio and making love in every state across the country. But the heaviness never lifts. It is still just them and still darkness, with trauma, loss and the condoms they never used to need packed in their suitcase, and a desperate love for each other holding them together.

***

His life is a series of broken promises, so he instantly knew he’d break the only one she’d made him swear to, sobbing in the middle of the night somewhere in Oklahoma. _Never try to find him, Mulder. I can’t do this twice._

He searches and searches from the office in their home, digging into contacts he’d left in the dust long ago, choking back an unwelcome but persistent bitterness toward the Gunmen for no longer being there.

His son’s name is four words and that’s twice as many as he expected, twice as much graphite on the page making the post-it that much heavier. He writes the name again, slower this time so as to not mistake a single letter later, and the weight is almost too much to bear.

***

Now that they have found some semblance of normalcy, his hatred has quieted itself. Time makes it easier to understand choice, to understand fear, to see her own self hatred call for him to make things better for her. The space they’re allowed now reminds him how empty they both were before there was never more than ten feet between them.

But he rarely looks her in the eye anymore, because he doesn’t know how to tell her that her fears are right. That their son isn’t better off, that he isn’t happy, that his life isn’t the way it should be.

Mulder hasn’t reached out to William, but he’s seen transcripts that show a boy who rarely attends classes, who spends his afternoons in detention, who got arrested for breaking and entering at 11, burglary at 12 and possession with intent at 13.

He doesn’t have to break any laws to receive the last piece of news, an obituary chilling his hands as it slides off the printer. He reads and rereads, because surely there’s more than one William Van de Kamp, aged 13.

He shoves the paper in the shredder, punches a hole in the wall of his office, and then rips the shredded pieces to bits before setting them on fire. He covers the hole with pictures of him and Scully, before their lives fell apart. He hates her again, but only for a second before he remembers that he was the one who left first.

Scully comes home from the hospital an hour later and wraps her arms around him as he cooks dinner. He turns around and kisses her with more love and hate than he ever knew he held inside. He realizes he can never tell her that a part of them has died, and this fact just adds another foot to his grave, tears away another piece of his soul.

***

When William dies, when Mulder follows, he knows it’s only a matter of time before she leaves. Before she can’t understand why he holes up in his office and sleeps on the couch, coming to bed only when he can’t handle it anymore, when he needs to hold her more than he needs to protect her.

The confession is always at the tip of his tongue, and the less he talks, the less likely she is to learn that she is no longer a mother, once again. The life in her eyes is dimming, but something is still lurking there, and he can’t be the one to put it out.

He will never let her see the autopsy report, the one that ruled their son’s death an overdose, the son she had sent away to protect. He never lets her hear him as he cries in the shower each morning after she leaves for work, mourning the loss of everyone he has ever loved.

So he lets her scream at him, lets her beg him to talk, lets her cry and kiss him and pack box after box, as long as that spark is still there. He has lived with grief his entire life, this is who he is, but she, she knew another way before him.

***

He’s amazed at how easy it is to get access, how open John and Mary Van de Kamp are to him coming out here. Well, not exactly him, but Tom Bryant, a freelance journalist writing about the heroin epidemic in Wyoming.

They give him coffee and ham sandwiches and tell him story after story of the bright-eyed, brilliant boy who could have had it all. They tell him how he came into their home, how he loved them and then pushed them away like teenagers do, how he fell in with the wrong friends, a much older crowd, and they didn’t know how to stop him.

William never learned he was adopted, never learned anything but love; they say, _it was just part of God’s plan,_ yet Mulder knows they’re still grappling to figure out what that plan is.

They call him Billy. Everyone did, his friends and his teachers and the sheriff who knew him too well. He was Billy when he came in wearing cuffs and Billy when he charmed his way free under the judge. Billy as he helped around the house and worked the ranch, as Mary pleaded with him on the phone to come home after disappearing with half the cash from her wallet.

The tape recorder memorizes the words that Mulder can’t, and he hopes in vain that one day he can share this with Scully. They hand him pictures and he watches his son age in reverse, until William’s lying in a crib the day after he’d lain in Scully’s arms.

“We have doubles,” John says as Mulder stares, “you keep that one.”

Their son doesn’t look like either of them, not really. His eyes are a nondescript hazel, his hair a dark brown. Their features melded together so well that it’ll take hours before Mulder will be able to draw apart what William took from each. If he had to guess, he’d say William looks more like him, he thinks after John gives him several more to take home. Mulder stares and stares, and lets go of another bitter doubt that his son is really his.

“Do you want to meet his favorite horse?” Mary asks, and they take him to the back of the ranch, into a pasture where a chestnut mare trots up to meet them. Mulder rubs her nose, combs his fingers through her mane, feeds her a sugar cube from John’s pocket. _William’s hands were here,_ he realizes, and even though William’s hands have been everywhere in this house, only here, with the warm breath and slobber on his palms, does it feel real.

“When will the story run?” Mary asks with hope in her eyes as they say goodbye.

“It will probably be a few months,” he lies, and considers actually writing, submitting this to the Times with a false byline. He realizes he’s given life to them twice and he can’t make himself take away their last beacon of hope, that their son didn’t die in vain, that his story will save others.

John walks Mulder to his rental car and grasps a firm hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll tell her,” he says, and Mulder looks up at him, questioning. “You didn’t have to lie, but I understand why you did. This is good though, it’s cathartic for her.” _For us,_ Mulder knows he means, but this is rural Wyoming and such luxuries aren’t allowed for men like him.

“You have the same light in you as he did. His smile though,” John says as he hands Mulder one last photo. “That must be from his mother.” Mulder looks down, and there, that silly quirk of his lips, that is Scully.

Mulder studies the two dozen photographs throughout the plane ride, looking for that connection John saw. He’s an expert at seeing these things, but he’s blind to how it’s so obvious that the boy in front of him is theirs.

He returns home to their always empty house, props the picture of smiling William on the coffee table and stares at it until he falls asleep.

***

He wakes one autumn morning to her voice in his ear, her hand in his hair. It’s the only peaceful dream he’s had since she left months ago, and he wants to trick his body into staying there forever. But her lips on his forehead are undoubtedly real as his eyes flutter open to see her crouching down beside him.

“Morning,” she whispers, and he blinks several times, because he never thought she’d walk through the door again. And then she’s nudging his shoulder and sliding onto the couch with him. They barely fit, and his arm reflexively grips around her waist to stop her from sliding off the edge.

“What are you doing here, Scully?” he asks, and pulls her impossibly closer.

“You haven’t answered your phone for days, I just wanted to see if you were okay.”

“Cell died,” he says, and buries his head into her neck. “Unplugged the house phone a few months ago.”

He used to hate her, but now he does nothing but love her desperately. He’d tried to be bitter that she had given their son away to a life that killed him, but the same love that made him run away all those years ago is the same love she felt as he gave up William with a heavy heart, and at some point he’d lost the ability to be mad at her for this.

“When did you find him?” She asks, and he understands why she is crawling into his arms and kissing the top of his head as if they had never fallen apart. Just over her shoulder he can see the photographs he’d kept in a neat pile spread out; he wonders how long she looked before she woke him.

He kisses her forehead and then presses it to his own, bringing his lips to whisper over hers.

“Are you sure you want to know?” She nods, and he cups her jaw, holding her still against him. “Scully,” he starts, and then he waits and stares at her, because he needs to remember the last moment before the world ends.

Her eyes search his frantically until silent tears fall down his face; she breaks into sobs against his chest before he can continue.

***

He’d underestimated her, this woman beside him; It’s a mistake he hadn’t made in years, decades almost.

She had cried and she had mourned, she had yelled and she had left again. She had died and lifted herself out of her grave, standing two steady feet on solid Earth. When she enters through their door again, it’s with a suitcase, a test before she brings back more.

He holds her that first night, and when neither of them has any more tears left and the guilt in her stomach has subsided as much as it ever will, he tells her the stories he’s learned of the infant they once knew. And then she tells him of the times she almost lost their son, of the times he was taken from her, memories she’s never spoken of out loud, especially not to him.

Hours later, she whispers into the dark of the night, long after he’d thought she’d fallen asleep. “Losing you was just as bad as losing him. Don’t you ever try to protect me again.” He reaches across the bed to her, curls himself against her back and makes a promise he’ll fight for the rest of his life not to break.


End file.
